Battle of Fredericksburg

By George C. Rable

On Dec. 13, 1862, the Union's Army of the Potomac and the Confederacy's Army of Northern Virginia fought a titanic battle at Fredericksburg, Va. There were over 18,000 casualties in what appeared to be a stinging defeat for the Union side and a stunning victory for the Confederates. Yet the battle of Fredericksburg has never attracted as much attention as other major Civil War battles. To many students of the war, it has seemed little more than a major blunder by Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside with slight tactical interest or larger significance. Historians have also been fond of quoting Gen. Robert E. Lee’s remark uttered during the height of the contest: “It is well this is so terrible! We should grow too fond of it.” As this remark suggested, Lee’s army would easily win the battle, though this striking Confederate victory was largely a Union story.

Political and Military Background

In retrospect, the fall of 1862 had been high point for southern arms. Although Confederate offensives had been blunted at Perryville, Ky., and Antietam, Md., the war was not going well for the Federals, especially in the eastern theater. In the aftermath of Democratic gains in the October and November elections, Lincoln finally replaced the Army of the Potomac’s cautious and slow-moving commander Gen. George B. McClellan with Ambrose E. Burnside. Burnside repeatedly said he was not up to the job but reluctantly accepted it. He inherited an army filled with McClellan loyalists along with the always scheming Gen. Joseph Hooker. Burnside had no political enemies but significantly had no staunch political friends who would stand by him in time of trouble.

His first mistake was to reorganize the Army of the Potomac into three grand divisions of two corps each, a cumbersome structure that would prove unwieldy during both the campaign and the battle. As luck would have it, there had also been an important organizational change in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, where Gens. James Longstreet and Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson had been appointed to corps commands.

On Nov. 14, Lincoln reluctantly approved Burnside’s plan to advance on the Confederate capital at Richmond by way of Fredericksburg. By Nov. 17, elements of Gen. Edwin V. Sumner's Right Grand Division had arrived at Falmouth. Burnside expected pontoon bridges to be there so his army could cross the Rappahannock and occupy Fredericksburg but General-in-Chief Henry W. Halleck had not made the proper arrangements so the bridging material did not arrive until Nov. 27 — Thanksgiving Day. In the meantime Lee—still uncertain about Burnside’s intentions--had sent Longstreet marching toward Fredericksburg while Jackson remained in the Shenandoah Valley. Lee considered withdrawing back to the North Anna river — a more defensible point — but when Burnside did not immediately cross the river, he decided to defend the town. At this point in the war, Lee’s men exuded nearly absolute confidence in their commander and in themselves.

Almost all the controversies surrounding the battle of Fredericksburg have centered on Burnside’s strategic and tactical decisions. General Sumner had suggested crossing the river immediately before the pontoons arrived; Hooker and other officers had recommended that Burnside cross either above or below the town at a less easily defended point. Burnside decided to cross his troops into Fredericksburg where Lee would presumably least expect an attack. The political pressure to take the offensive undoubtedly weighed on Burnside’s mind and influence his thinking. Unfortunately, the general would begin the battle without the support of his subordinates and without fully explaining his plans.

The Battle

On the morning of Dec. 11, troops from Gen. William B. Franklin’s Left Grand Division, marched across pontoon bridges below the town and met with light resistance, but engineers constructing the bridges going directly into Fredericksburg came under heavy fire. Burnside ordered an artillery bombardment, and late in the day bridges could be finally be built and the first infantry cross into town. There was some heavy street fighting — a rare occurrence in the Civil War — and much looting for the next several days. Some soldiers even donned women’s dresses to mock the rebel belles. Burnside’s failure to bring more regiments into Fredericksburg and attack the next day — decisions often criticized by historians -- gave Lee time to bring up Jackson’s corps to occupy his lines south of town.

On the morning of Dec. 13, vaguely drafted orders and command confusion undermined the Union battle plan from the outset. Burnside hoped to attack the Confederate right and divide Lee’s army in two, but there was little coordination of effort. The battle began with divisions from the First Corps attacking Jackson’s lines. Here muddy ground, poor roads, woods, and gently rising Prospect Hill favored the defenders, but an unprotected gap allowed Gen. George G. Meade’s division to cross the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac railroad. Meade, however, was weakly supported and the Union assaults were repulsed in a furious Confederate counterattack. General Franklin proved to be very cautious and slow in funneling more men into the fight.

Burnside assumed that progress was being made on this flank and so ordered his forces in town to advance against Longstreet’s troops on the Confederate left. Under heavy Confederate artillery fire, the Federals emerged from town, crossed a millrace, found shelter in a slight swale in the ground but were still five hundred yards from the rebel lines. Georgia and North Carolina troops at the base of Marye’s Heights (which rose some 40 feet above a sunken road) occupied a strong position behind a stone wall. Withering artillery and infantry fire easily repulsed successive attacks — some head on, others trying to flank the Confederate position.

Despite heavy losses and over Hooker’s strong objections, Burnside kept pouring troops into the fight, in essence reinforcing failure. To be fair, Burnside did not have accurate information about the fight on the Union left, received false reports of Confederate artillery withdrawing from Mayre’s Heights, and may have kept attacking to deter a Confederate counterattack that might have destroyed his army, but the results were catastrophic. By nightfall, seventeen different Union brigades had attempted to attack the Confederate left; hundreds of men remained trapped on the field (“Eighty paces from the crest and holding on like hell,” reported Gen. Samuel Sturgis) amidst the screams of the dying and wounded.

On the morning of Dec. 14, Burnside had to be talked out of renewing the assaults. There was some skirmishing that day and the next, but by the morning on Dec. 16, the Union forces had skillfully slipped back across the Rappahannock. Lee had waited expecting another attack and was furious that Yankees had escaped destruction; he would always consider Fredericksburg a frustratingly incomplete victory.

The Results of Battle

The carnage was staggering: 12,653 Union casualties (1,284 dead) and 5,309 Confederate casualties (595 dead). Burial details, bodies tossed in trenches, the countless amputations in makeshift field hospitals, and stream of wounded sent North all testified to the horrific costs of this latest Union offensive. Long lists of the dead and wounded appeared in the newspapers.

The political repercussions were almost as striking. Only four days after the battle a cabinet crisis revealed growing Republican impatience with the administration and nearly forced the departure of Secretary of State William H. Seward. "If there is a worse place than Hell, I am in it," the careworn Lincoln remarked. News of the battle had arrived quickly by telegraph but much of it was as usual unreliable. Republicans newspapers tried to minimize the debacle while Democratic papers quickly reported another crushing Union defeat. News of Fredericksburg reverberated abroad, and The Times of London even talked of the impending fall of the American republic. So too the rising price of gold in New York reflected the gloom from Fredericksburg, and then there were fears that Lincoln might now delay issuing the final Emancipation Proclamation. Outraged northerners turned their ire on Burnside, Halleck or the President.

Demoralization and Recovery

Words such as “slaughter” and “butchery” appeared in newspaper editorials and soldier letters alike, and there were even loud calls to bring back McClellan. Burnside took full responsibility though Lincoln issued a bizarre letter suggesting that the failure was mostly “an accident” and congratulating the army that the casualties had been “comparatively so small.” Yet the Army of the Potomac lived to fight another day — in fact survived the disastrous Mud March and another crushing defeat at Chancellorsvillle. Shortly after McClellan’s removal, a member of the Sixth Wisconsin had clearly explained what he saw as the proper response to shifting fortunes of war: “The American soldier is true to his country, true to his oath, and resolved to fight the rebellion to the bitter end no difference who commands. [I] am not a McClellan man, a Burnside man, a Hooker man, i am for the man that leads us to fight the Rebs on any terms he can get.” If was it was easy to blame the generals or the politicians for the disaster, most Federals were convinced that the soldiers themselves had fought with remarkable courage at Fredericksburg. As one private explained, “We were defeated because bravery and human endurance were unequal to the undertaking.”

Demoralization and defeatism in the wake of Fredericksurg was palpable. After witnessing horrific bloodshed during the battle on Dec. 13 and after having been pinned down by Confederate sharpshooter fire on Dec. 14, a Minnesota volunteer ruefully commented, “I lost a chunk of my Patriotism as large as my foot.” The camps around Falmouth reminded many men of Valley Forge and soldiers became obsessed with simply staying warm and worrying about their next meal.

But despite all the grousing and a rising tide of desertions, another quality was apparent in the soldiers—perseverance. One lieutenant admitted that some of the men might have been “cursing the stars and stripes” right after the battle, but “these same soldiers will fight like bull dogs when it comes to scratch.” Indeed the grumbling veterans could be “relied upon more.” The quickest way to end the war, this soldier believed, was to give the Rebs a good whipping and silence the “croakers” at home. Indeed, memories of sacrifices already made and comrades lost sparked a kind of patriotic revival among Burnside’s men, not the flag-waving and hurrahing variety but rather the quiet kind of resolve that carried armies to victory.

Disillusionment and despair would not necessarily tear most men away from a still firm commitment to finishing their work. A Pennsylvania captain admitted being tempted to let others do the fighting but could never quite bring himself to act on this impulse. “I am a soldier and a good one,” he noted with unaffected pride. He would “growl” after a fight but when “an order came to storm a battery, nary a squeal would I make.” This last statement made up for the bad food, the damp ground, and the harsh talk about Burnside or Lincoln. It overshadowed the swearing, the grumbling, and wild talk of mutiny.

Even after Burnside’s aborted Mud March in January 1863, soldiers remained solidly if not always enthusiastically patriotic. As for the victorious Confederates, they suffered their own frustrations. The Yankees had “suffered heavily,” Lee wrote to his wife “but it did not go far enough to satisfy me.” Months later Lee admitted, “We had not gained a foot of ground and I knew the enemy could easily replace the men he had lost.” Others simply celebrated a great victory. Confident editors dismissed the Federals as plundering cowards who had supposedly been forced into battle at bayonet point. Reports circulated in the army and back home that Federals were completely demoralized. Such assessments inevitably led to bragging: if the Federals cared to test Lee’s army again, a young South Carolinian in Gen. George Pickett’s division said, “Let them come.” Confidence swelled all across the Confederacy and morale soared in the Army of Northern Virginia despite cold weather and worsening supply problems.

Although Lee always warned against overconfidence, he also closely read northern newspapers, and grasped the depth of Federal despair in the aftermath of Fredericksburg. His faith in his subordinates and his men, and perhaps even in himself, naturally grew. The talk of an early end to the war was predictable and at the same time foolish, to be expected but also dangerous. The price of a seemingly too easy victory at Fredericksburg and an even more dramatic triumph at Chancellorsville was Gettysburg. In retrospect, Fredericksburg had perhaps been more demoralizing than it should have been to the Yankees and certainly more exhilarating than it should have been to the rebels—both a false nadir and a misleading zenith. All that was missing then was a Homer to record the epic tale of dashed hopes and shifting fortunes for both the Federals and the Confederates.

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